The room was deathly silent. The dim glow from their flashlights reflected off the glass vats, casting distorted shadows on the metallic walls. Suspended within the murky green fluid were human bodies—dozens of them, their forms eerily preserved, as if frozen in time.
Vance's grip on his rifle tightened as he took a slow step closer, peering through the thick, green-tinged fluid in one of the vats. The body within was a man, his features pale and unblemished by decay thanks to the preservation systems. His skin was almost translucent, stretched too tightly over his frame, as though his body had suffered some unnatural process before being sealed in.
The upper half of his skull gleamed under the light—partially reinforced with metal plating that seamlessly merged with the bone. Tubes ran from his arms into ports embedded directly into his veins, their purposes lost to time.
"...What the actual fuck?" he muttered, his voice barely above a whisper.
The rest of the team surveyed the rest of the room. Dozens of vats stretched into the darkness, each holding a variation of the same horror—people trapped in eternal slumber, their bodies twisted, augmented, and reshaped in ways that defied ethical science. Some bore additional limbs, skeletal structures altered to accommodate unnatural mutations. Others had patches of scaled flesh, their musculature resembling that of the monsters from the previous chamber.
But the most unsettling detail was that all their faces were expressionless. Their eyes, though shut, seemed moments away from opening.
Dr. Lianne stepped forward, gripping her scanner with white-knuckled fingers. She moved toward the nearest vat, her breath shallow as she examined the corpse inside. A woman, mid-thirties, her left arm replaced with what could only be described as a giant stinger, its exoskeleton fused directly into her muscle tissue.
"How intriguing..." she muttered, her face a mix of fascination and dread.
"Doctor," Stone said, as he walked up to her. "What are we looking at here?"
Dr. Lianne didn't answer for a while, steadying herself as she swept the scanner over the vat. Numbers and diagrams flashed across the device's interface, but the data made little sense at first glance.
"Some kind of augmentation," she finally answered, her voice tight with disbelief. "But somehow, the fusion is… seamless. It's almost as if their bodies were grown to accommodate the implants, not just modified after the fact."
Stone frowned. "Could you explain that in more layman terms, please?"
Dr. Lianne exhaled sharply, her eyes still fixed on the scanner's screen. "It means they took all these human bodies and.... repurposed them, to make them compatible with these 'enhancements'. They must have been researching to combine the splicing human and mutated beast DNA to form some kind of evolved lifeforms with the advantages of both."
The room fell silent, the weight of Lianne's words settling over the team like a suffocating blanket. Vance's grip on his rifle tightened as he scanned the rows of vats, each one holding a new nightmare. The man with the reinforced skull, the woman with the stinger, the others with their twisted limbs and scaled flesh—they were all part of the same horrifying experiment.
Stone exhaled, rubbing his chin as he studied the rows of vats one last time. The eerie stillness of the preserved bodies, the unnatural fusion of flesh and metal—it all pointed to something far beyond conventional augmentation.
"We have to be better informed of what we're dealing with here," he said finally, turning toward the engineers. "See if you can access the research logs. There's got to be something in there that explains what the hell they were doing."
Cooper and Harlan exchanged glances before moving toward a rusted terminal in the corner of the lab. The once-sleek machine was now a relic of a forgotten age, its frame warped with corrosion, its screen coated in a thick layer of dust. Time had not been kind to it—several exposed wires hung loosely from its side, and the main power console was cracked down the middle, barely holding together.
Cooper slung his pack off his shoulder, retrieving a set of tools and a portable power supply. The generator hummed to life as he unspooled a pair of thick cables, searching for an intact input port. Meanwhile, Harlan pried open a side panel, revealing a tangled mess of wires—some severed, others melted into the casing.
"Damn," Harlan muttered, shaking his head. "This thing's been through hell."
"Just bypass the fried circuits and route power directly to the core system," Cooper said, pulling out a diagnostic device. "We only need enough juice to access the data within."
Harlan grumbled but got to work, stripping away dead wiring and reconnecting what he could. Sparks flared as he adjusted the connections, testing the flow of electricity. Meanwhile, Cooper tapped at his device, running a preliminary scan.
"Some of the storage drives are intact," he reported. "But the interface is shot. We'll have to boot it in safe mode and patch the OS manually."
Stone crossed his arms, watching impatiently. "How long?"
Cooper exhaled through his nose. "If we're lucky? Five minutes. If we're not? We'll be here all night."
Harlan muttered something under his breath before making a final adjustment. "Alright, I've stabilized the main feed. Let's see if this junker still has a pulse."
He flipped a rusted switch on the side of the terminal.
For a long moment, nothing happened. The screen remained dark, unresponsive. Then, a faint flicker. A distorted logo briefly flashed before dissolving into static. The machine emitted a grating whine, its speakers crackling with the sound of failing hardware.
"Come on, come on…" Cooper muttered, fingers flying over the keyboard as he input a series of bypass commands. The terminal sputtered, lines of corrupted text filling the screen. Then, with a flickering buzz, the system stabilized just enough to display a crude command prompt.
"There we go," Cooper said with a smirk. "Now we're in business."
Harlan wasn't as confident. "Half of this data is corrupt. We might get fragments, but there's no telling how much is actually readable."
"We'll take what we can get." Cooper cracked his knuckles and started navigating through the terminal's archives. The system lagged, each action sluggish, as if straining to remember its purpose after decades of neglect. Error messages flashed intermittently, warning of missing files, unauthorized access, and database corruption.
He kept typing, swiftly, bypassing security protocols that had long since lost their integrity. The encryption was outdated—formidable in its time, but nothing even someone like him couldn't handle. Within moments, the garbled text on the screen reassembled itself into something more coherent.
A directory appeared.
[ACCESS GRANTED]
[LOADING ARCHIVES…]
A list of research logs populated the screen, each timestamped from decades ago. Some files were too corrupted to open, their names reduced to unreadable strings of characters. But a handful remained intact.
Cooper turned to Lianne. "Looks like you're up, Doc."
The biologist stepped forward, her eyes scanning the dense paragraphs of scientific jargon. Even with her expertise, much of it was unintelligible—strings of technical terms, numerical designations, and cryptic references to materials she had never encountered.
"This isn't my field," she admitted, her brow furrowed. "I specialize in mutated beasts, not... whatever this is."
"Can you at least get the gist of it?" Stone pressed.
Lianne exhaled, continuing to scan through the files. Certain phrases stood out amid the jargon:
[Subject Group 339-ISSTH-D: Yield rate at 0.05 percent. Strengthening procedure inefficient after pre-injection of 1426342803-SMN. Fresh source material required.]
[Time pressure increasing. Special Project 'A' halted due to lack of viable 339-ISSTH-D subjects. Enhancements dependent on sufficient supply.]
[Material 32289-DAX-Q: Failed prototype. Compatibility with Special Project 'A' reduced by 23 percent. Current origin framework proving more flawed than anticipated.]
[Subject 339-ISSTH-D-420 demonstrating unexpected autonomy. Raising security levels by one rank.]
Lianne's face hardened as she pieced together the implications. She looked up from the screen, glancing between the vats and the team.
"They weren't just experimenting on people," she said. "They were specifically experimenting on adepts and strykers."
Vance stiffened. "You're saying these guys—" He gestured toward the vats. "—were cultivators?"
Lianne nodded. "From what I can piece together, this facility was researching whether cultivators could be strengthened by merging them with mutated beast traits. That's why some of them have scales, exoskeletons, additional limbs... It wasn't just cybernetic augmentation. They were splicing mutated beast biology into cultivators!"
A heavy silence settled over the group. The implications were disturbing. The now destroyed country that housed this research base had been conducting experiments to push origin cultivation beyond its natural limits, using living cultivators as raw material.
Stone exhaled sharply, dragging a hand down his face as the weight of the revelation sank in. "Goddamn it…" He turned to Dr. Lianne. "Were they successful? Did they actually create something viable?"
Lianne hesitated, her fingers tightening around the scanner. "It's hard to say. The failure rate was high, and the logs suggest they struggled with compatibility issues. But if they kept going…" Her gaze drifted back to the vats. "Some of these subjects might be their later attempts."
Vance took a step back from the glass, as if expecting one of the bodies to stir. "Yeah, well, let's hope they stayed failures."
A sudden beep from the terminal made everyone snap their attention back. Cooper's eyes widened. "Wait, there's a restricted folder here. Let me see if I can—" He typed rapidly, bypassing layers of archaic encryption until the file decrypted with a chime.
A single video file appeared on the screen. It was dated decades ago, its title ominously labeled Project Archive – Final Phase.
Harlan exchanged a wary glance with Cooper before hitting play.
The footage was grainy but clear enough to see a large observation chamber. In the center stood a humanoid figure, its silhouette tall and unnervingly still. It was hooked up to countless cables, tubes, and restraint locks embedded in the floor and walls. A low mechanical hum underscored the scene as researchers in sterile suits surrounded the entity, monitoring readouts on thier screens.
A voice crackled through the speakers, a calm but clinical tone narrating the event.
{Subject 339-ISSTH-D-420—designation Revenant—has achieved full synchronization with Special Project A. Genetic fusion stability has exceeded projections. Unlike previous test subjects, Revenant demonstrates enhanced cognitive function, motor control, and combat efficiency. The final trial will now commence.}
The figure in the video twitched. Then it moved.
Vance's breath caught in his throat as he saw its features clearly. The thing was once human, but its skin was segmented with armor-like plating, smooth and organic yet metallic in sheen. Its eyes glowed dimly beneath a reinforced skull structure, and as it flexed its fingers, the movement was eerily fluid—inhumanly precise.
Then, chaos.
The restraints snapped like brittle twigs. The researchers barely had time to react before the creature blurred forward. The first scientist was lifted off the ground, throat crushed before he even screamed. Another tried to flee, but the entity moved faster, its arm morphing into a blade-like structure that cleaved through flesh and bone with surgical efficiency.
Screams erupted, alarms blared, and security forces stormed in, opening fire as the screen filled with static and then cut to black.
Silence filled the room.
Rion loudly cleared his throat. "Well. That answers that question."
Stone exhaled, rubbing his temples before turning to Cooper and Harlan. "Scrape as much data as you can from that terminal. I want every single file copied."
Cooper nodded, fingers flying over the keyboard as he set the portable drive to work extracting the files. Harlan, however, hesitated. His jaw clenched as he glanced back at the grotesque forms suspended in the vats.
"You sure that's a good idea, boss?" Quan, one of the mercenaries muttered, his voice tight with unease. "This is some sick shit. Splicing mutated beasts with cultivators? That's not research—it's butchery. We shouldn't be taking any of it with us."
Stone's expression darkened, his voice dropping to a warning tone. "Our job isn't to pass judgment. We were hired by the Normos Family to retrieve intel, and that's exactly what we're going to do. This mission isn't about morals—it's about results."
Quan's hands curled into fists at his sides. "You don't get it. Some knowledge isn't worth keeping. What if someone decides to continue this research? What if we're helping bring something even worse into the world?"
Stone narrowed his eyes. "That's not our call. You knew what this job was when you signed up. We report our findings—end of story."
Quan looked like he wanted to argue further, but before he could, a sharp crackle from their radios interrupted the conversation.
Static flared in their earpieces, followed by a garbled voice. {Team leader—come in! We've got—zzzt—outside—big trouble—}
Stone grabbed his radio. "Say that again. You're breaking up."
{Something's—krrk—big. We—zzzt—saw it—ruins—krrk—like they were noth—}
Stone's eyes narrowed. "Repeat. What's coming?"
A burst of static swallowed the response, then— {—coming straight for—zzzt—building! I don't—krrk—hell it is, but—}
The team exchanged tense glances.
Then the signal briefly cleared, the voice laced with raw fear. {Shit—shit! It's—krrk—horizon! Looks like a—} The transmission cut off abruptly, replaced by a high-pitched whine.
Then, from beyond the facility's crumbling walls, a deep, guttural roar shook the air.
Stone's expression darkened. "We need to move. Now."